Last post by bodyman -
Temps are finally out of the deep freeze and on monday I was able to do some painting , sprayed the header, spoiler, fuel door, hood scoops and headlight bezels. Some sanding and buffing on the header and spoiler on Tuesday, and some assembly yesterday and today. Hopefully get the bumper covers, grille, and headlight covers prepped for paint this weekend.
The tempo window runs seem to fit really well with some careful trim work where it meets the belt moulding and vent window. The 80-96 ford truck window run was a perfect match for the vent window section. I did a little experimenting with the Tempo runs to see if they would work on full window cars, I think there is some potential there.
The cut out is where the tempo run changes directions and runs down the front of the door. The cut out allows it to lay flatter in the tbird door to reach where it changes direction. I didn’t spend much time trying to get the angles right for a better splice at that point but I think it would be doable. Not sure if that notch will create a wind whistle, but maybe some careful urethane work would seal it back up.
I cant speak from the administative or setup end but from the user perspective i have yet to see any forum improve by updating or switching over to a "better" setup. Not once in over 25 years using forums. Everytime i see this situation it becomes "we lost this when we did this and cant get it back" or "we did this to get these modern social media features that nobody uses but we lost all our archives and images people uploaded 10 years ago" . It aint just not liking change it always comes with loss.
Oh this is very true. We lost image links when we moved from vBulletin to ElkArte. Alex has given several good attempts at fixing the links (I believe we have the images still in our hosting space) but it never worked. And chances are decent that it can happen again if we move to a different board software. But if we get someone that can do the translation for us, maybe they'll have better luck at fixing everything.
Our minimum requirements for PHP is v8.0 and that's where we're at right now. And it took a LOT of work to get us there. If we get a notice that the minimum will be any higher than that, the board software update will fail unless ElkArte comes up with a hot fix, which I wouldn't hold my breath for...they have been rather slow at rolling out updates in the last decade. So then we would have no board at all. Would you rather have a board exist and mostly work, or no board? That's the situation we're in as far as the admins go.
Translation between boards is never perfect. We can try to mitigate that with an outside developer that knows message boards and their database structures. Or we can trash everything, start anew, see where things go.
Last post by Aerocoupe -
That can be true but this forum needs to be hosted and on a software that is supported and stable. I don’t think any of us are worried about the bells and whistles just stability so we don’t loos this forum like how some have just disappeared.
Last post by Ductape91 -
I cant speak from the administative or setup end but from the user perspective i have yet to see any forum improve by updating or switching over to a "better" setup. Not once in over 25 years using forums. Everytime i see this situation it becomes "we lost this when we did this and cant get it back" or "we did this to get these modern social media features that nobody uses but we lost all our archives and images people uploaded 10 years ago" . It aint just not liking change it always comes with loss.
Last post by bodyman -
I’ve been watching that one for a while now. Originally had it listed at $3000. If it wasn’t an 8 hour round trip across the state from me I would probably grab it at $1200. Or at the very least go check it out.
Last post by Chuck W -
My preference is for not to use AWS, but that's just me.
My webhosting is through ipage and have honestly had no issues over the years, but I don't run a forum or the like on it. I primarily use it for storage and I had my motor mount stuff on it when that was a going thing.
After 4eyedpride fell down and went boom, and the back-ups were lost or corrupted, it was a big shock/loss to the community. I for sure don't want to see this site suffer the same fate.
Last post by EricCoolCats -
Thanks for the input everyone, it's appreciated and also helps with the direction.
So far...I found a few potential devs that may be able to translate the ElkArte database to something else, likely phpBB or MyBB, and that's fine. This would be the cheapest solution. To buy Xenforo outright would be around $300-400 with the good add-ons. I don't think that's a bad deal. Even if the initial install goes south on us, there are people out there that will install it for us for a fee. These solutions give us options at least.
Hosting...that's kind of another issue. I don't hate our current hosting but it is on a shared server and we very frequently have interruptions or downtime. Dedicated/cloud hosting through them is expensive (US $32/mo). I could move the hosting over to the dedicated server we have at work, but it would chew up a lot of space that we just don't have right now. Or we could go AWS for hosting, but as everyone has experienced, when AWS goes down then so does like 25% of the internet. Money-wise it is probably a decent deal though.
And we still have to think about backups for those hosting accounts which don't offer that. We've been using Backblaze at work and it's automatic, very nice once set up. Probably be about US $5-10/mo.
Lots to think about. For starters I'll look into getting the database translated and go from there. We've only got half a million posts and 40K topics to translate, no big deal.
Last post by Aerocoupe -
XenForo is what Stangnet is on and yes, it is really nice. I think something that will help us make a decision is what would the cost be per year to make a move to something like XenForo vs other options and what functionality would we gain that we would actually use. We also need to realize that migrating over to a new board platform will have upfront costs so the first year is likely going to cost more than successive years.
So...this is where we are. Suggestions, comments, criticism welcome. There is no timetable for this, just throwing around ideas but we would like to get going this year.
Thanks everyone!
Like others have stated over on Chuck’s thread this is way out of my wheelhouse. The only thing I’d be good for in this situation is some dollars. My thought is do what you think is best and start a collection.
